Get through or Let go?

Recently I spoke about ‘going through it’, about how life throws lessons at you, lessons you can’t avoid or ignore. In order to grow as a person, you do need to see the lessons that present themselves (yes, there will be many, great and small) and learn.

‘It’ can be whatever difficult situation in which you find yourself. You have a choice each time to either ‘let go’ or ‘go through it’. Both are learning opportunities.

A little about ‘letting go’. By this I mean to have non-attachment, to stop holding on to ‘things’… to what you think will make your life better or to the conditioned belief you have thus far not questioned or to the behaviour that no longer serves your life.

In this space, letting go is making peace with it. As you come to terms with the ‘things’ within the situation, for example, your need for control, your need for the crutch, your need for approval, your need for material indulgence etc. As you make peace with these, their impact cease to be.

If a situation still bothers you, if it still cages you, makes you close up, makes you bitter and resentful… then you are not letting go. No matter how much you tell yourself that you are. And if you can’t let go, then the ‘it is not affecting me’ or the ‘I am fine with it’ that you tell yourself, is you doing avoidance. The test whether you are letting go is this – letting go comes with a sense of peace.

So when letting go is untenable, not viable, unavailable or impossible then time to face the situation. As I said, going through a difficult situation involves some ‘doing’ and a whole lot of ‘being’. Where there is pain or sorrow or any difficult emotion, at some point you need to sit with it, maybe even endure it for a time. However you decide to choose to ‘go through it’, you do.

Both ‘going through it’ and ‘letting go’ have a quality of hardness – where you fight for your survival, you overcome the obstacles in your way… and also of softness – where you embrace your vulnerability, sit with your sorrow, bear witness to your life. And in those moments, there is strength, there is courage.